Suddenly he became aware that, not only was the black-robed form of Albertus Magnus approaching him, but that the gigantic figure of Peleg, carrying the Brazen Head itself on his shoulder, with Ghosta at his side with one arm raised to help in supporting the thing’s weight, was also, yard by yard, slowly ascending the slope.
What unluckily nobody had seen — or luckily perhaps, for who can tell from what horrors to be safely dead may save any of us — was that by the force of his scientific magnetism Petrus had drawn Heber Sygerius, the old ex-bailiff himself, out of Sir Mort’s “Little Room”, and dragged him all through the forest, and not by the easiest route either, till he sank absolutely exhausted, just where this particular trail ended, at the foot of the Lost Towers slope.
Old Heber knew exactly where he was; and the odd thing was that, though totally exhausted and unable to advance another step, he felt, as he stretched himself out on the warm, dead, dry, brown pine-needles, and allowed his whole body to relax and his whole being to sink down and down and down and down into a deep delicious bed of submission to the need for everlasting rest, a wave of greater happiness than he had ever known in all his long life.
It may well be that what gives to the wind along that Wessex coast its indescribable mixture of vague sorrow and wild obscure joy comes from its passing, on its unpredictable path, the floating hair of so many love-lorn maidens and the wild-tossed beards of so many desolate old men.
As it blew now across those forests and those swamps, it might have been suspected of taking a goblinish delight in switching and twitching and bewitching the crazy wisps that fluttered this way and that from Spardo’s chin. Was its long-drawn wail made deeper, was its wild exultation made shriller, when it became the choric accompaniment to Spardo’s careless killing of the one man in all that place who had prayed morning by morning and night by night for years that he might perish by just such a stroke and cross Acheron while he slept? For with the weapon he had snatched the Bohemian Bastard beheaded old Heber.
It must have been his awareness of the black-robed teacher from Cologne advancing so rapidly up the slope behind him that made Peter Peregrinus start running towards Lilith, as she stood defying all possible universes with her slender girlish back to the open doors of the absolutely empty and deserted Lost Towers. When he was just beneath her and only a foot or so below her, he gazed passionately at her face. He not only felt an over-mastering longing to possess her, but a longing to possess her in complete solitude. And where could he find such solitude if not within the mysterious castle before him, at whose entrance she stood?
But as he gazed at her he saw to his dismay that there had come into her face a look of horror at him and of loathing of him and of contempt for him, such as he had never seen upon anyone’s face before.
“All the same for that”, as Homer puts it when he deals with these crises in human affairs, Petrus moved towards her. What drove him, what actuated him was clear enough. The difficult question for any chronicler to decide is the question as to whence within the almost closed circle of this strange man’s consciousness he drew the strength, the energy, the spirit, to enable him to risk all, in this almost heroic manner? For that he was risking all was a truth he felt in himself, and of which he had not the slightest doubt.
And yet, cold-blooded, calculating, unscrupulous egoist as he was, he could not have been blind to the fact that there was no reason in the ordinary natural course of events why anyone, who so far had derived all sorts of thrilling feelings from being alone in life and being absolutely impervious to everything save his own private, uncommitted responses to life, should run a risk of this magnitude. Yes, from what region, or channel, or nerve in his being, did he derive the courage to take such a chance? Is it perhaps that in the lives of all human beings there come moments when some particular desire — in Peregrinus’s case just now, what we call “the passion of love”—drives such a sharp wedge into the rocky substance of our animal nature that it goes clean through it, leaving a slit or crevice or crack in the mysterious thing that Grosseteste taught Roger Bacon to analyse very carefully, the thing which the theologians declared to be the vegetative soul of the foetus developing a nutritive soul, which is thus laid open for “Something”, we can call it a rational soul, to enter from the limitless Outside when the infant is born.
Yes, he was risking his all and he knew it. And yet with this strength that came to him from somewhere outside himself, perhaps from the great “Outside” of all our planetary struggles, he still went forward, pressing the lodestone desperately against the fork of his body and repeating hoarsely in the depths of his being: “I am Antichrist! I am Antichrist!”
Lilith retreated till she was in the space between the two big doors; then seizing them both with outstretched arms, she tried to shut herself inside. But she was too late; and it was together, and with a combined effort, that they finally got the great doors shut and barred, leaving only their dark woodwork in the centre of that vast structure of stone as the target for all that crowd of onlookers.
Only one of the numerous people, whom the demonic power in Peter of Maricourt’s lodestone had succeeded in gathering before those closed gates, gave any thought at that moment to what was happening behind those closed doors, and that one was Roger Bacon.
“It is like what went on,” he told himself, “between the Devil and the first wife of Adam; the very same devil who a little later was present at the creation of Eve. If I weren’t so tired I’d work out a clear map of these zodiacal revolutions in Time and Space.”
It was indeed only natural that our Friar felt “tired” as he had not been out of his prison-chamber for more than a year. But he felt in good spirits and extremely interested in all he saw. So he seated himself on the mossy root of the oldest oak-tree in sight, a tree that might well have been an offshoot of the yet older one on which the bird rested who first brought to Britain the news of the death of Jesus; and from this secure position, as he contemplated the crowd and watched his own creation, the Brazen Head, balanced on the shoulder of Peleg and supported by what Homer would have called the “leukolenian” arm of the stately Ghosta, he allowed his mind to drift in a mood of fascinated wonder over the long eddies and aberrations of mankind’s historic pilgrimage down the ages, pondering upon its pathetic, humorous, and tragical struggles with itself, with Nature, and with the innumerable false prophets and false gods who from the beginning have led us all astray.
But as he rested under that oak, half-awake and half-asleep and unusually happy, he suddenly became aware, by no very unnatural thought-transference, of the laboured approach to his side of none other than Lay-Brother Tuck from the Priory. The most hostile historian could have caught nothing but friendly amusement in the tone wherein this anticipator of all mankind’s wildest inventions replied to this interruption when he heard himself greeted by Brother Tuck.
“Sit down, Brother,” was all the Friar said. “So you’ve come for me, have you? Well, well! We shan’t have any trouble except in our own legs as we go back. O no! I haven’t the faintest intention of leaving my room in the Priory, my ‘Prison’ some call it, but you and I know better! We know how little I regard it as anything like that! What did I become a Friar for? Wasn’t it for a quiet study to work in? You know that, Tuck old friend, as well as I do! Nobody but you, Tuck old rogue — Here! Sit you down here! You must be fairly done in after all that distance! — nobody but you knows what racy stories go round in our rollicking Bumset!